Racism isn’t even the worst part of Pentagon coup | Will Bunch Newsletter

Maybe it was just the weather. Last week’s “cold open” to the newsletter was larded with despair, but now that February is going out like a lamb with the thermometer headed over a balmy 50, it feels more hopeful. The Phillies are back on the field, as are soccer’s undefeated Union, and an anti-Musk-and-Trump protest movement is growing after a winter of hibernation. Hang in there.

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Is there such a thing as DEI for white men? Why not ask Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the second Black man to reach the summit of the U.S. military as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and holder of that post until an event this weekend that some are already dubbing the Friday Night Massacre.

In a nation where “meritocracy” has become the most politically loaded word in the dictionary, no leader had displayed more actual merit during his rise to the top than the 62-year-old Brown. The son of an Army colonel, Brown earned a degree in civil engineering — he’d later earn his master’s degree in aeronautical science — from Texas Tech before joining the Air Force. An F-16 fighter pilot, Brown — known to all as “CQ” — flew 130 hours in combat missions as he rose steadily through the ranks. By 2018, he was commander of U.S. air defense for the Pacific region, and in 2020, he became the first Black man to lead the Air Force as its chief of staff.

The year of Brown’s next-to-last promotion was also a fraught moment for America’s racial divide, amid George Floyd’s murder and subsequent protests. He filmed a surprisingly emotional video that he shared with the airmen he commanded in the Pacific.

“I’m thinking about the pressure I felt to perform error-free, especially for supervisors I perceived had expected less of me as an African American,” the general acknowledged. “I’m thinking about having to represent by working twice as hard to prove their expectations and perceptions of African Americans were invalid...”

And yet Brown’s decades of hard work and stellar performance still weren’t enough for Donald Trump — who as a rich kid in the 1960s got a doctor’s note about bone spurs to avoid fighting in Vietnam — or his handpicked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a former Army Reserve major who veered into a hard-drinking life as a weekend TV host. On Friday, Trump fired Brown just two years into his term as Joint Chiefs chairman and replaced him with a less qualified white man, Gen. Dan Caine.

The resume of Caine, a retired three-star general in the Air Force, is far less impressive than that of Brown, except for the one-line entry that matters most to the monarchically-minded 47th president: extreme loyalty to Trump. On a visit to Iraq during his first term, Caine impressed Trump, who later described the white general as out of “central casting,” and even made an unconfirmed claim that Caine had donned a Make America Great Again cap and told the president he would kill for him.

Apparently, the crew at “central casting” is on the lookout for white male actors at the Pentagon in Trump’s second act. The president’s unprecedented purge late Friday night also axed the only woman member of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the chief of the Navy. In a 2024 book, the then-pundit Hegseth had dismissed Franchetti as “a DEI hire,” although he offered no evidence beyond her lack of male plumbing.

It’s easy and understandable to cast the Friday Night Massacre as racist and misogynistic — because it was. Trump campaigned in 2024 against what he called “the ‘woke’ military,” which was echoed on his TV screen by Fox News' howling Hegseth and harkened back to the glory days of an all-white military brass, the kind of folks who brought you the Vietnam War.

One of Trump’s first acts as 47th president was to fire the first woman to lead a branch of the military, Admiral Linda Fagan, commandant of the Coast Guard. The new, whiter Pentagon is implementing policies to match, from banning new transgender troops to abruptly cancelling efforts to recruit talented young African Americans.

But we should understand that the most important early moves from Trump 47 — especially this unprecedented coup at the Pentagon — often serve a dual purpose: offering the red meat of white male privilege to his MAGA base, but also consolidating his power as an authoritarian strongman. While Trump may have liked Caine because of his movie-theater fantasies of what a general should look like, what mattered more was the airman’s willingness to kill for Trump.

Because it could come to that. And not necessarily on foreign soil.

Keen observers of Friday’s Pentagon power play noted that equally important to Brown’s ouster, if not more so, was the firing of the top military lawyers for the Army, Navy, and Air Force. These judge advocates general, or JAGs, play a critical role in deciding what constitutes a lawful use of the military under the Constitution. In defending the move, Hegseth claimed he wanted lawyers with more of “a warrior ethos” who were less concerned about the notions of social justice that bother him so.

Perhaps, but the biggest legal issues facing the Pentagon under Trump will almost certainly involve the use, or misuse, of the military on U.S. soil. During his first term, a resolute Pentagon brass led by then Joint Chiefs chair Gen. Mark Milley thwarted Trump’s urging to use soldiers to violently put down those 2020 George Floyd protests, as well as the possible misuse of the military during the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol.

Today, Trump has already begun to involve the military in what he claims will eventually become the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants — in costly flights of shackled detainees to Guantanamo Bay or foreign airstrips — with talk of even greater involvement as the operation expands. That’s alarming, un-American, and yet it might also be a harbinger of worse things to come.

During the 2024 campaign, Trump and his MAGA allies also threatened to call out the military to put down domestic protests, the kind of abuse that Milley held at bay in 2020. The more aggressive that Trump and his seeming co-president (the unelected billionaire Elon Musk) become in shattering the guardrails of American democracy, the more likely that angry citizens will take to the streets. The Friday Night Massacre ensures that no one at the Pentagon will stop Trump from sending out tanks, the kind of response he long ago admired in Tiananmen Square.

In a remarkable New York Times guest essay, Frank Kendall, who was Secretary of the Air Force under Joe Biden, called Trump “a rogue president” who would have little reason to replace the three highly qualified JAGs other than plans to issue future unlawful orders. “If there is one characteristic of this president and this administration, it is the utter lack of respect for legal constraints,” he wrote. “Mr. Trump has been clear about his views. Among many examples, he recently wrote, ‘He who saves his country does not violate any law.’”

Trump’s Friday Night Massacre is a dangerous politicization of the military, seeking generals whose loyalty will not be to the U.S. Constitution, or to the American people, but to Donald J. Trump. That’s the kind of thing you expect to see in a so-called banana republic, a backwards nation that routinely sends out the troops to put down unrest. Trump wouldn’t have fired the Pentagon’s top generals and lawyers in Act I of this political drama unless he expected to dangerously deploy the new ones in Act II.

Yes, the president’s sacking of the top brass was racist, and, yes, it was also sexist. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

Question: Do you think America recovers from … this? I’m an optimist, but it’s getting really dark. I think we will never be the same, but I hope democracy can survive this era. — via @michaelperoff.bsky.social‬ on Bluesky

Answer: I got so many great questions this week, all of which cried out for a 2,000 word essay, including yours. I agree this is an unusually dark moment, but the history of nations, and especially the United States, has been cyclical, and will continue to be. I’m sure Americans in 1862 doubted that democracy could carry on, and I even remember people feeling that way after the assassinations and riots of 1968, when I was 9 years old. We’ve seen 249 years of constant struggle between revolution and reaction, between radical notions of liberty and ancient hierarchies of repression. That probably won’t end with Donald Trump, or with us, or our children. America is neither exceptional, nor is it doomed.

Not surprisingly, the majority of readers weighing in on last week’s question about the way forward in the Russia-Ukraine conflict hoped for continued strong U.S. support for Ukraine and its president Volodymyr Zelensky, even as the Trump regime pulls America in the opposite direction. “Otherwise,” Raisa Andryczyk said, “Russia and Putin get rewarded for their aggression and will be emboldened to do it again with [the rest of] Ukraine and other European countries.” But there were naysayers. “It is clearly time for the U.S. to broker a deal to end the Ukraine hostilities, even if Putin gets the best of it,” Daniel Hoffman wrote, arguing that U.S. ground troops could get dragged into a prolonged conflict.

📮 This week’s question: The two top Democrats on Capitol Hill, New Yorkers Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, have been floundering about in the early days of the Trump regime. Who do you see as an actual leader of the Democratic Party? Please email me your answer and put the exact words “Democratic leader” in the subject line.

It seems that the rapid unraveling of the dream of a more diverse and inclusive America — rebranded by the Trump regime and his MAGA movement as the more sinister-sounding “DEI” — has ramifications beyond just the purges taking place in the federal government and on college campuses. How else to explain the surprising bloodbath at MSNBC, the cable-TV news network with a supposedly liberal bent, in which the new, Philly-native boss either fired or downgraded five on-air presenters, all of them Black, brown, or Asian-Americans? The grim racial optics of this move never would have happened in the 180-degrees-different climate of 2020 and the George Floyd protest marches.

After one month on the job, new MSNBC president Rebecca Kutler abruptly pulled the plug on Joy Reid — arguably the most leftward politically of the network’s primetime hosts, especially in her willingness to criticize Israel’s attacks on Gaza — and her 7 p.m. show, The ReidOut. The Asian-American host Alex Wagner won’t be returning at 9 p.m. when the popular Rachel Maddow ends her 100-day Trump coverage marathon, to be replaced by former Joe Biden press secretary Jen Psaki. Also out are weekend hosts Ayman Mohyeldin, Jonathan Capehart, and Katie Phang.

To be sure, Kutler was under pressure from higher-ups at MSNBC’s current owner, Comcast, back in her native Philadelphia to address a predictable plunge in ratings (already somewhat rebounded) as liberal viewers demoralized by Trump’s November victory turned off their TV sets. And to be fair, this isn’t the Pentagon: Some of the replacements — including current weekend hosts Michael Steele, Symone Sanders-Townsend, and Alicia Menendez filling Reid’s 7 p.m. slot — are also not white. Still, one wonders why there was never any talk of replacing the married Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, whose ratings have taken the steepest plunge after their bended-knee pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago. MSNBC’s loyal yet often disrespected liberal audience hasn’t forgotten the 2003 firing of host Phil Donahue, whose criticism of the Iraq War drumbeat didn’t fit that era’s conservative zeitgeist.

The harsh moves were too much for Maddow, whose ratings power when she decides to show up at 9 p.m. makes her untouchable from sanctions by her MSNBC bosses. On Monday night, she surprised viewers by lashing out at the purge. “I will tell you, it is also unnerving to see that on a network where we’ve got two — count them, two — non-white hosts in prime time, both of our non-white hosts in prime time are losing their shows, as is Katie Phang on the weekend, and that feels worse than bad no matter who replaces them,“ she said on live air. ”That feels indefensible. And I do not defend it.” She also gave a passionate defense of Reid as well as dozens of MSNBC staffers whose lives have been upended.

For better or worse, MSNBC is often associated with today’s Democratic Party, especially with its revolving door for ex-Biden aides like Psaki and Sanders-Townsend and a reluctance to give airtime to leftist critics of the party. It should be revealing to everyday viewers that the elites who run America’s supposedly liberal political party and its supposedly liberal TV network seem equally clueless in how to best respond to Trump’s return. The empty suits of Capitol Hill and cable TV were never going to save us. Only the grassroots can keep the republic.

It’s interesting to go back in time and see how some of us saw Donald Trump coming from a mile away. On this date nine years ago, when the short-fingered vulgarian was a first-time candidate, I was writing about the surprising support for Trump in big-city, mostly white working-class neighborhoods — a phenomenon that was arguably an even bigger factor when he won for the second time in 2024. I wrote that “living in places like Boston and Philly where they’re governed by Democrats and surrounded by smug liberals (like me) — Trump’s noxious comments feel like fresh air to them." Read the rest: “Archie Bunker: Alive and well, living in Philly, voting for Trump.”

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